Posts from the ‘TECHHistory’ Category

Zoho and Google both have offered free office suite for years, and today, Apple announced that their office suite will also be free across all Apple devices.

Given that Microsoft Office has long been the de-facto monopoly, none of our three companies have anything to lose in commoditizing the office suite market. That is the nice thing about facing a monopoly in an adjacent market – every player other than the monopoly would win if they get a non-zero share of a massively shrunk market. If the $20 billion market shrinks to $2 billion, we at Zoho would celebrate it, as long as we can hope to get a share of that shrunken market. In fact, competitors would win even if they don’t get any share of the shrunken market, because it denies the monopoly the ability to use its cash cow to dominate adjacent markets they do have an interest in.

That very same dynamic has played out in the operating system market already. The near-zero revenue share that competitors to Windows had meant that Google and Apple could give away their operating systems (which Apple also announced today!) and not have anything to lose. What Google achieves with the $0 ChromeOS license it charges OEMs (which costs Google exactly $0 in foregone operating system revenue) is that the OEM will now turn around and ask Microsoft for a $0 Windows license.

What OS X, iOS, Android and ChromeOS have collectively achieved is to drive Windows market share to under 25% of all client devices and yet, these alternative operating systems derive near zero revenue in and of themselves.

The Silk Road and NSA spying may be old news, but The Onion Router (Tor) continues to generate interest among Internet users seeking online anonymity. Tor isn’t all upside, though. As I found out, you pay a price for privacy.

To put things in context, Tor hides your online activity, plain and simple. It covers your tracks, including your browsing history, identity and physical location. Tor also anonymizes the websites you visit and their operators.

While such activity might sound inherently nefarious, remember that Tor technology also grants anonymity to people fighting tyranny, oppression and other injustices. And for the record, the Tor Project was initially funded by the U.S. government.

Given the many legitimate, compelling use cases, it may be time to ask if Tor is right for you. Well, I’ve put Tor through its paces and come up with my top five tips to help you decide.

It’s a case that’s captured everyone’s attention — pirates, drug trafficking, hit men, government intrigue. By now, few people haven’t heard about Silk Road, run by the now notorious Dread Pirate Roberts, a pseudonym from the film “The Princess Bride.” It’s an interesting next chapter to perhaps the biggest news story of 2013 — Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA cyber snooping. Although there is new speculation about whether the FBI had help from the agency, it certainly showed the NSA that it too can flex its technology muscles, as it shut down purportedly a billion dollar illegal drugs website and nabbed its operator last week.

In the past couple of years, marketers have awakened to the incredible power of content creation. But equally important — and much more complex — are the ways that you share that content.

“Content is king, distribution is queen, and she wears the pants,” said Jonathan Perelman, VP of Agency Strategy at BuzzFeed, during his talk at Behance’s 99U Pop-Up School event on September 20th.

As the Internet has evolved, so has the ways that people discover content. Content used to be discovered on forums, then through email, highly-trafficked blogs, and search, leading to the SEO craze, explained Perelman. Now, it’s primarily discovered through social media.

And with readers discovering content on myriad social media platforms, brands need to learn how to tell stories in ways that take advantage of each.

Some of the most compelling social media and content marketing stories are those that happen in real time. They seize the opportunity to be part of conversations at the peak of their energy and relevance. In the age of 24/7 news cycles, instant mobile internet access and quick and dirty social sharing via Twitter and Instagram, being first—but also clever—wins.

As Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca Cola’s VP of Advertising Strategy and Content Excellence put it in his recent Content Marketing World keynote: “Real time marketing is the holy grail of all the marketing we do so that we can produce content that reflects what’s going on in the world.”

Of course, Coca Cola, is a big consumer brand, but the same realities—and benefits—come into play for B2B marketers (albeit on a much more targeted scale, typically). Whether B2B or B2C, real-time content marketing falls into three main categories that your content strategy should account for. RELATED CLASS:Real Time or Die: Feeding the Content Beast